For Artists: How to Get Your Gigs Listed and Found in Ireland

Most artists who complain that their gigs are invisible have not been overlooked — they have never been published anywhere a machine can read. Listings sites, search engines and voice assistants all work from the same raw material: public web pages with facts on them. This is how that pipeline actually works, and the handful of things that put you into it.

How a gig listing comes to exist

There is no central registry of Irish gigs. What exists is a chain: someone publishes an event page — a venue's what's-on page, a ticketing platform, a festival programme, an artist's own site — and aggregators like us read those pages every night, extract the date, time, venue, act, price and ticket link, and match them against what we already hold.

Everything follows from that. If a fact is on a public page, it can propagate to a dozen places without you doing anything else. If it lives only in a social post, a story, a poster photograph or a WhatsApp group, it goes nowhere at all. That is not a preference of ours: social platforms deliberately block automated reading, and an image of a poster contains no machine-readable text.

The one page that matters

For every gig, make sure a public web page exists carrying five things in plain text:

1. The act name, exactly as you want it to appear, and nothing else in that field.
2. The date, unambiguously — the year included.
3. The start time. A real one, not a placeholder.
4. The venue name and the town, spelled as the venue spells it.
5. The price, or a ticket link, or an explicit statement that entry is free.

That page can be on your own site, the venue's site or a ticketing platform — it does not matter which, as long as it is publicly reachable without a login. One page per gig is far better than a single “tour dates” block of text, because a page per event gives every listings site something unambiguous to point at.

Name discipline

Act names cause more listings problems than almost anything else. A few rules that will save you recurring grief across every platform, not just ours.

• Pick one canonical name and never vary it.Ampersand or “and”, “The” or no “The”, accents in or out — decide once. Every variant risks becoming a separate profile somewhere.
• Keep the act field for the act.Not “Live in the Bar”, not “Promoter presents…”, not “Support Act”, not the name of the night. We strip those patterns automatically, but the cleanup is imperfect and you lose control of the result.
• Separate a multi-act bill clearly.Names joined with “+” are read as separate acts and each gets credited on the gig. A bill written as one run-on title becomes one nonexistent act with a very odd name.
• If the night is a recurring session, name it as one.“Traditional Session” is a perfectly good listing title, and we handle recurring session labels differently from artist profiles by design — see our session guide for why the two are not the same thing.

Structured data: the cheap professional trick

If you have any control over your own website, add JSON-LD structured datato each event page using schema.org's MusicEvent type. It is a small block of markup that states the same facts a human reads, in a form every crawler understands unambiguously: name, startDate (with a real time and timezone offset), location with the venue name and address, performer, and offers with a price, currency and ticket URL.

This is the difference between an aggregator guessing at your page and reading it exactly. Most modern website builders and ticketing platforms emit it automatically — which is one good reason to use one rather than hand-building a text page.

Use a ticketing platform, even for small gigs

You do not need advance sales for a €10 pub gig to benefit from putting it on a ticketing platform. Ticketing pages are heavily crawled, well structured, carry a canonical price, and give you a link you can use everywhere. They also settle the free-or-paid question definitively, which no amount of social posting does. Our guide to gig pricing covers the fee trade-offs.

Claim your artist profile

If you have played anywhere that publishes listings, you probably already have a profile on LocalJams built from those listings. Claim it and it becomes yours to control: verified ownership, then the ability to add and edit your own gigs, correct your name, upload a proper photo, write a bio, set genre tags and add your links. It is free, and verified gigs entered by the artist are the most accurate listings we hold, because they skip the guessing entirely.

Two practical wins beyond accuracy. Followers: people can follow your artist page, and your new dates then surface to them without you paying anyone for reach. And completeness: a profile with a bio, a photo and links reads as a real act to both humans and search engines, where a bare name does not.

What listings sites cannot fix for you

• Gigs nobody published. If the venue never listed it and you never listed it, no crawler will conjure it.
• Announcements that exist only as images. A poster JPEG is unreadable to every system in the chain.
• Late changes. If a time or venue changes and no page changes with it, the wrong version is what propagates. Update the source page, then tell the listings sites.
• Ambiguous venues. Two venues with the same name in different towns are a real problem for matching. Always publish the town.

The rest of the press kit

Once the listings side is solid, the promotional basics are simpler than people make them: one good high-resolution photo that a venue can actually print, a short biography of about a hundred words in plain prose, a longer one for anyone who wants it, two or three links to recorded music, one live video that sounds like you really sound, and a contact address that a person reads. Keep them on one page of your own site and send the link rather than attachments.

The checklist

1. One canonical act name, used everywhere.
2. A public page per gig with act, date, real start time, venue and town, and price or ticket link.
3. Structured data on your own event pages if you control them.
4. A ticketing platform link where there is any charge at all.
5. An explicit “free admission” where entry is free.
6. A claimed LocalJams profile with photo, bio, genres and links.
7. Corrections sent when something is wrong — we fix reported errors.

Venue-side, the equivalent advice is in our guide to running a live music night, and it is worth reading even if you only play in other people's rooms — a venue that publishes properly makes every act on its stage more findable. You can see how your own listings look right now in Explore or in the venues directory.